Difference between revisions of "Cursing in English on Twitter"

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Revision as of 04:46, 26 February 2014

Wenbo Wang, Lu Chen, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Cursing is not uncommon during conversations in the physical world: 0.5% to 0.7% of all the words we speak are curse words, given that 1% of all the words are first-person plural pronouns (e.g., we, us, our). On social media, people can instantly chat with friends without face-to-face interaction, usually in a more public fashion and broadly disseminated through highly connected social network. Will these distinctive features of social media lead to a change in people’s cursing behavior? In this paper, we examine the characteristics of cursing activity on a popular social media platform – Twitter, involving the analysis of about 51 million tweets and about 14 million users. In particular, we explore a set of questions that have been recognized as crucial for understanding cursing in offline communications by prior studies, including the ubiquity, utility, and contextual dependencies of cursing.

Introduction

Do you curse? Do you curse on social media? How often do you see people cursing on social media (e.g., Twitter)? Cursing, also called swearing, profanity, or bad language, is the use of certain words and phrases that are considered by some to be rude, impolite, offensive, obscene, or insulting [26]. In this paper, we use cursing, profanity and swearing interchangeably. As Jay [7] pointed out, cursing is a “rich emotional, psychological and sociocultural phenomenon”, which has attracted many researchers from related fields such as psychology, sociology, and linguistics [6, 8].

Over the last decade, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. According to the 2012 Pew Internet & American Life Project report [25], 69% of online adults use social media sites and the number is steadily increasing. Another Pew study in 2011 [24] shows that 95% of all teens with ages 12-17 are now online and 80% of those online teens are users of social media sites. People post on these sites to share their daily activities, happenings, thoughts and feelings with their contacts, and keep up with close social ties, which makes social media both a valuable data source and a great target for various areas of research and practice, including the study of cursing. While the CSCW community has made great efforts to study various aspects (e.g., credibility [13], privacy [1]) of social networking and social media, our understanding of cursing on social media still remains very limited.

The communication on social media has its own characteristics which differentiates it from offline interaction in the physical world. Let us take Twitter for example. The messages posted on Twitter (i.e., tweets) are usually public and can spread rapidly and widely through the highly connected user network, while the offline conversations usually remain private among the persons involved. In addition, we may find that more of our actual exchange of words in the physical world happens through face-to-face oral communication, while on Twitter we mostly communicate by writing/typing without seeing each other. Will such differences lead to a change in people’s cursing behavior? Will the existing theories on swearing during the offline communication in physical world still be supported if tested on social media?

To address such differences, this paper examines the use of English curse words on the micro-blogging platform Twitter. We collected a random sampling of all public tweets and the data of relevant user accounts every day for four weeks. We first identified English cursing tweets in the collection, and extracted numerous attributes that characterize users and users’ tweeting behaviors. We then evaluated the effect of these attributes with respect to the cursing behaviors on Twitter. This exploratory study aims to improve our understanding of cursing on social media by exploring a set of questions that have been identified as crucial in previous cursing research on offline communication. The answers to these questions may also have valuable implications for the studies of language acquisition, emotion, mental health, verbal abuse, harassment, and gender difference [7].

Specifically, we examine four research questions: • Q1 (Ubiquity): How often do people use curse words on Twitter? What are the most frequently used curse words? • Q2 (Utility): Why do people use curse words on Twitter? Previous studies [7] found that the main purpose of cursing is to express emotions. Do people curse to express emotions on Twitter? What are the emotions that people express using curse words? • Q3 (Contextual Variables): Does the use of curse words depend on various contextual variables such as time (when to curse), location (where to curse), or communication type (how to curse)? • Q4: Who says curse words to whom on Twitter? Previous research [5, 11] suggested that gender and social rank of people play important roles in cursing; do they also affect people using or hearing curse words on Twitter?

Method and Analysis

Data Collection

Cursing Lexicon Coding

Cursing Frequency and Choice of Curse Words

Cursing vs. Emotion

Cursing vs. Time

Cursing vs. Message Type

Cursing vs. Location

Cursing vs. Gender

Limitations

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

References